Neverending drawing

(Via), this Neverending Drawing project (by Oskar Karlin) is very neat:

Never ending drawing is a project I started in Stockholm five years ago. Inspired by Douglas Coupland’s book Microserfs, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy and some drawings made by my sister I started mapping my movements in the city. I downloaded a map over Stockholm and pasted it into Illustrator and drew my movents in separate layers each day. After two years I moved to Berlin and then London and continued the project there. Earlier this year during a trip I also mapped my movements in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.

My limitations are a defined area around the central parts of the city I am in. So if I go outside the “borders” I don’t map it out. You could call it vacation. Since all the data is stored in vector format it is easy to work with.

An example: on the left is is Stockholm, Berlin and London on top of each other, and on the right, it's basically the same as but instead of outlinesKarlin have filled each day with a color with low transparency(Stockholm is green, Berlin is red and London is blue).

Why do I blog this? I like this sort of visualization/city mapping; the chaos created is intriguing and quite situationist. Overlaps are pertinent, maybe this is an instantiation of the Global City.

Blutooth locative media

BlueWay is a project carried out at the ITP by Myra Einstein, David Yates, Robert Faludi, Arly Caryn Ross, Leif Mangelsen:

BlueWay at the Spring Show provides personalized guidance to friends, business contacts, locations, projects, and services by taking advantage of technology already carried by most users.

Visitors at a BlueWay kiosk can have have their picture taken and linked to their Bluetooth-enabled device. As they move through the space, BlueWay senses the visitor’s presence using their Bluetooth ID and displays their location. Participants receive pertinent wayfinding information when and where they need it. Their presence is depicted on master display maps, so other people can also quickly find them. These signs even benefit guests who do not register with the system, because the useful information they provide is visible to everyone.

Why do I blog this? yet another location-based application using bluetooth that aims at providing guidance/wayfinding information. IMO what is more interesting here is to use the bluetooth ID as presence/community indicator.

IHT on location-based marketing

Yesterday in the IHT, there was an interesting article about mobile phone/billboard interactions.

JCDecaux, the outdoor-advertising company behind the project, is that consumers consent to receive alerts about digital advertising as they move through the city. "We are switching from a one-time active response to the user's blanket acceptance of many digital messages," he said. "We will, of course, need to be careful in making certain that users get only advertisements that interest them." When participating users are near an active advertisement - it could be part of a billboard or a bus shelter poster - their phones will automatically receive a notice that a digital file can be downloaded. The information could range from a ring tone or short video to a discount voucher. "With this project, we are really starting to create the personalized digital city," Asseraf said. "We eventually will see a rich dialogue running between mobile phones and what are now uncommunicative objects." (...) A cautious and permission-based approach is vital when using technologies that touch consumers so directly,

The permission feature is indeed a crux issue.

What's behind a "personalized digital city"? What are the consequences? having people immersed in different levels of information? what about spam? What are the assumptions? that we already have a different perception of space and place, territoriality and the cues that make us think it's different? or is it just a way to better reach potential customers?

They seem to care about that:

The potential shortcomings would be apparent in any large public space that might have many digitally enabled posters close to one another. "You can imagine a nightmare scenario where someone's mobile phone fills up with half a dozen advertising messages each day as they walk across Waterloo Station," Edwards said. "The most powerful way to use this technology will be offering people something of value that they really want."

The article also addresses two applications:

they also were developing airport signs, called UbiBoards, that will show information in the language spoken by a majority of the people nearby. "If mobile phones near a sign say that the majority of people are Chinese, the sign will show information in Chinese," Banâtre said, adding that such a system would require registrations much like the ad system. "Those who do not speak Chinese will receive the same information in their phone via SMS message in their own language." Another application, called UbiQ, is being developed to allow people in a location like a bank, cinema or fast- food restaurant to give information by cellphone about what they want before getting to the front of the line. "Think about it and you realize how much time is spent giving the same start-up information for a transaction," Banâtre said, citing the time it takes for a teller to enter banking details. "The intention with UbiQ is to speed up the exchange of information through mobile phones."

Why do I blog this? after few years of emergence in the LBS world, location-based marketing seems to be one of the most developed application (after navigation tools) but there is still no consensus about best practices as well as a positive user experience: the added value is often balanced by the risk of information overload (physical spam). This does not mean that location-based marketing is not useful but it's tough to invent something really valuable.

wi5d search engine

wi5d (Wireless 5th Dimensional Networking) seems to be an intriging company. It had been created in 2005 and it's focused on the development of a context-aware approach to surfing the Web as they say.

By challenging the myth that the web frees the user from space and time considerations, we hold that the most valuable search engine will not aim to organize cyberspacecc, but rather will aim to better connect individuals with the potential energy of their own spatial/temporal context.

Their system is called MapNexxus (they have this weird habit of puting their text as image files):

As it's explained on the website, the company was purchased by an "anonymous buyer" during the beta development phase...

Why do I blog this? Since I am interested in spatial technologies, I am wondering about how user would employ this sort of search engine. How would they relate on location-based information.

Discussion with taxi driver in Irvine

Me: I want to go to UC Irvine (we were at the Amtrak Station) Taxi driver: mmmh, do you have the address?

Me: mmmh no

Taxi driver: I cannot go there, I am new here and I need an address to put in my GPS

Me: I don't have the address but I have the directions descriptions on this paper

Taxi driver: mmmh but it's not on my GPS, I cannot go there

(we finally got there, he called a friend on the phone...)

From spatial practices to a context-aware system

Augmenting the City: The Design of a Context-Aware Mobile Web Site by Jesper Kjeldskov, Jeni Paay in Gain: Journal of Business and Design. The authors present “Just-for-Us” - a context- aware web site for mobile devices augmenting the social experience of the city.

Informing design, field studies of social groups’ situated social interactions were carried out in a new civic space in Melbourne, Australia followed by paper prototyping and implementation of a functional mobile web site. The produced solution augments the city through web-based access to a digital layer of information about people, places and activities adapted to users’ physical and social context and their history of social interactions in the city. The system was evaluated in lab and field, validating the fundamental idea but also identifying a number of shortcomings.

Why do I blog this? I am less interested in the outcome (the website) than in the process that leads to the design of such system. The gathering of information about people and the way they think in terms of space and place is quite relevant here.

One of the key findings from the field studies was that the physical space of Federation Square is divided into four districts each with distinct features and landmarks. Like many other places, the space has significant focal structures but it is difficult to find out what is going on behind the facades. (...) Another central finding from the field studies was that people typically coordinate meeting up with their friends in a highly ad-hoc manner. Typically, this involves a lot of communication negotiating who, why, where and when to meet. (...) Another finding from the empirical studies, which had impact on the design of Just-for-Us, was that places and spaces are dynamic and that setting matters immensely for the quality of socializing – especially in relation to its physicality, the presence and activities of other people and convenience in terms of proximity. (...) A fourth finding from the field studies of socialising at Federation Square, which had impact on the design of Just-for-Us, was that people make sense of a place through the social affordances provided by other people; where they are and what they are doing there.

Street Interconnectivity

Google Cartography: Street Art in Your Neighborhood is a curious google hack by Richard Jones:

Google Cartography uses Google via the Google Search API [] to build a visual representation of the interconnectivity of streets in an area.

This application takes a starting street and finds streets that intersect with it. Traversing the streets in a breadth-first manner, the application discovers more and more intersections, eventually producing a graph that shows the interconnectivity of streets flowing from the starting street.

Figures and show maps generated for two of the world's great cities, New York and Melbourne, respectively.

Why do I blog this? because I am fascinated by interconnectivity.

Hunaja: user study of a mobile social software

Three years ago, while scanning the literature+web about a PhD topic about location-awareness, I stumbled across Hunaja, avery pertinent mobile social software developed by some good finnish folk at Aula. I remember at that time being briefly in contact with Jyri.

Hunaja is an RFID access control system that enables users to remotely check who is logged in at a physical location by using the Web or a mobile phone. Hunaja was developed in 2001-2002 by Aula Cooperative, which is a non-profit organization based in Helsinki, Finland. In addition to controlling the doors of the Aula space, Hunaja has three unique features:

• Linkage to Aula's weblog - enabling online members to remotely see who is logged in at Aula's physical space
• SMS access - enabling members to check who's there with their mobile phones
• A speech synthesizer at the door - enabling online members to send greeting messages. The messages are announced by a computer voice when the recipient logs inat Aula's door

For three months (May-July, 2002), Aula issued a trial set of 50 RFID tags to its members. Of those 50 members, 9 members were selected for this user study. All of the participants were in the 20-35 year-old age group, and their use of the system was followed and recorded for two weeks during the month of July.

What is of particular interest for me is the fact that they conducted a very relevant user study. It was a focus group consisted of 9 people between the ages of 20-35, whose usage patterns were followed for two weeks in July, 2002.

was interested by the reason why people are scouting moves: Entertainment / Time-saving / Spying / Romance / Avoidance / Professional interests / Recruitment. Here is an extract I found relevant to my work:

For the observers, Hunaja provided three media of ”browsing” other people: Web, SMS, and the Aula space. Hunaja worked as a personal intelligence system that enabled the users to optimize their actions (scout useful next steps) and build a strategy for personal postitioning in the network.

Examples of observer behavior: A male user intends to meet a female user without wanting that person to know that he is looking for her A user does not want to meet a specific person and uses Hunaja to avoid meeting that person in Aula A user browses Aula member cards to recruit suitable people for a project For the observed, Hunaja provided a method to ”be noticed”. Motives linked to this included the desire to make new contacts, showing commitment to developing the user community, personal branding, and career-building.

Some users were motivated by the desire to belong to a close-knit group. Stephanie, the 29-year old French graduate student, for instance, had become a Hunaja user because she had a strong desire to establish herself in communities of like-minded people in Helsinki. She placed strong symbolic value on the RFID tag as a token of group membership. For her, appearing on Hunaja was a prerequisite for group membership, and she took care to establish herself as an active user in the eyes of others. In a similar vein, Lisa, a 26-year old manager at an e-learning company, used the term “addiction” to describe her relationship to Hunaja. In the interview she said: “I thought, do people thing that if I don’t show up on Hunaja or visit the weblog at least once a week, will they think that I want to keep up some kind of super privacy and that I’m fed up with Aula or something.” She felt a strong obligation to use Hunaja so as to “not give the wrong impression” of ignorance and passivity. Such instances describe situations where use of the technology becomes a prerequisite for group membership. You have to use the system in order to”exist” in the community. This may be a strong driver for adoption of future mass-market technologies geared for “small worlds” like Aula.

Why do I blog this? because my phd research work is about how location awareness of others impacts social and cognitive processes.

Combining paper maps and electronic information resources

This one is for you Mauro:Derek Reilly, Malcolm Rodgers, Ritchie Argue, Mike Nunes, Kori Inkpen, (2006) Marked-up maps: combining paper maps and electronic information resources, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Volume 10, Number 4, pp.215 - 226

Abstract: Mobile devices have been used as tools for navigation and geographic information retrieval with some success. However, screen size, glare, and the cognitive demands of the interface are often cited as weaknesses when compared with traditional tools such as paper maps and guidebooks. In this paper, a simple mixed media approach is presented which tries to address some of these concerns by combining paper maps with electronic guide resources. Information about a landmark or region is accessed by waving a handheld computer equipped with an radio frequency identification (RFID) reader above the region of interest on a paper map. We discuss our prototyping efforts, including lessons learned about using RFID for mixed media interfaces. We then present and discuss evaluations conducted in the field and in a comparative, exploratory study. Results indicate that the method is promising for tourism and other activities requiring mobile, geographically-related information access.

Keywords: Mixed-media interfaces - Geographic maps - Mobile interaction devices

Mobile Radicals on Location-based services

A very interesting blogpost about the fall and rise of location-based services on Mobile Radicals:

During the early days of WAP capable mobile phones, BT Cellnet in conjunction with the then un-deregulated 192 service and Yellow Pages would allow you to find such useful things as a curry house when out on the town after a few too many pints. The idea was great and full of promise, but alas didn’t really work. The public understandably were confused by the fact that if they were standing outside their favourite curry house and asked for the nearest, the service would often point them to one that was at best a few hundred yards away. The problem was that the service used the mobile network CellID to determine your location. (...) With 2G services these cells were on average quite large. Outside major cities (in particular London) a single cell could easily have a radius of a few kilometers. Early LBSs could not tell where within these cells you were standing. LBSs could only provide the location of the requested service that it had listed for that particular cell. (...) The few survivors of the dot-com bust in 2001 have tailored themselves towards a business service rather than a consumer service. Most CellID based location services are used for asset and employee tracking, therefore performing paradigm-180. (...) Whilst the early implementations of cell style location based services have died out, the idea itself has found new homes in a variety of areas.

The most well known of these areas is the search industry. Most ‘Yellow Pages’ style companies and big search engines allow you to search for shops and other service providers based off your geographic location. ‘Find the nearest’ has become a must-have feature for almost all search firms. Instead of using your current location based off a very fuzzy positioning system (like CellID), they use post (zip for our American readers) code to locate your position. (...) Satellite navigation firms are the latest to enter this area. Modern GPS-based navigation systems contain facilities to find the nearest fuel station, or other point of interest based on your current position and projected route. (...) GPS provides a much finer resolution for LBS to use. Consumer devices with accuracy to within 100 metres in most situations, and to within 15 metres in ideal conditions, are now available on the mass market. (...) Cells are shrinking with the roll-out of 3G base stations, and it is possible to use signal strength from multiple transmitters to triangulate the position to within a few hundred meters, so better LBSs are possible.

Why do I blog this? understanding lbs troubles and problems is interesting. I appreciate the kind of stories beginning with "The public understandably were confused by...", a very recurrent issue with technologies.

Location-based games overview

Rashid O., Mullins I., Coulton P., and Edwards R. “Extending Cyberspace: Location Based Games Using Cellular Phones,” ACM Computers in Entertainment, Vol 4, Issue 1, January, 2006 This article is a comprehensive overview of location-based games, describing enabling technologies as well as examples of what's out there (no mention of Catchbob! :( maybe it's because designing our game was not the ending goal but a way to study certain phenomenons ). As they describe, it seems that GPS and WiFi are the most used technologies and they describe how bluetooth and RFID might be a good contribution.

Interestingly, the article gives a good critique of existing gameplay:

All the location-based games discussed can be categorized into three genres: action/adventure, treasure hunt, and role-playing games. Finding other players in a shoot-em-up game can initially be exciting, but the gameplay can quickly become repetitive, and the games rely on high numbers of players with the same game in the same area. Treasure hunt games can quickly become boring when played alone, and those that create an event appear to receive greater publicity and recognition. Although some of the games being marketed are massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), their inability to compensate for the short gameplay of cellular users may hamper the ability to immerse players in the games. Geo-fencing provides a new element to games, in that players can specify their own virtual territory based on their actual physical neighborhoods. The incorporation of community features such as mobile chat are effective because they take advantage of the social nature of the cellular phone, and are features likely to prove significant in the success of these games. (...) For now, location-based cellular gaming is a niche market, which often depends on players owning specific devices and subscribing to specific carriers. However, there is strong evidence that these games are capturing the imagination of a new audience, and if the games can mature to give a wider variety of gameplay and experience, they might yet achieve their potential as a major location-based service.

Why do I blog this? it's a good overview, it depicts the actual picture of location-based games and some of the challenges. I would maybe add that lbg should go beyond object collection/hunt (in the same way LBS should move forward buddy finder and place annotation) to be more successful, offering more interesting challenges. But hey that's not so easy. Maybe a good way to do so is to have more features based on these scenarios or to radically invent new approaches.

Also, see the expression "extending cyberspace", this concept is still around for some people Alex!

Loki: Location-Based Internet Search & Navigation

Ted Morgan from Skyhook Wireless pointed me: Loki is a beta version of a new toolbar the integrates location in web searches and allows users to share and tag locations:

Loki is the first application to combine the physical with the digital to make the Internet a truly personal and local experience. We let you harness the World Wide Web by automatically identifying your exact physical location and then making the web revolve around you.

With one click, instantly find the nearest jazz band, directions to the closest Thai restaurant, the cheapest gas prices in town... or even pinpoint your exact location on a map. You can even share that location with others

Why do I blog this? It's actually a good interface between the physical and the virtual world. I'd be interested in seeing patterns of usage of this tool (moving beyond buddy-finder issues), the advantage of the "search" feature is obvious but will there be ways to use the system in rich collaborative ways? That is around the topic of my PhD. The thing here is that you don't need gps/cell phone ID triangulation but WiFi hotspots.

Skyscout: point and click to identify stars and planets

(via) Skyscout is a GPS-enabled handheld device meant to "point and click convenience to instantly identify thousands of stars, planets, constellations and more".

Identify: Simply point the SkyScout at any star in the sky and click the "target" button. The SkyScout will instantly tell you what object you are looking at.

Locate: To locate a star or planet, select the object's name from the menu and follow the directional arrows through the viewfinder. SkyScout tells you when you are on target. It's that easy!

Learn: Once you have targeted an object the real fun begins.

The SkyScout includes entertaining and educational audio and text information, including facts, trivia, history and mythology about our most popular celestial objects.

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of using locative technology: deriving your location to spatial artifacts via GPS technology.

It's a bit cheesy anyway: you can get "text description of some of the coolest objects man has sent into space including the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Space Shuttle"...

Wanderer: continuous movement in space guided by GPS

Wanderer is a project by Jiri Heitlager & Jonas Hielscher (which I met last sunday). From what they explained me, it's an interesting location-based game. The main idea is very intriguing; it might lead to very curious patterns of movement in space:

The game Wanderer was developed during the CARGO WORKSHOPS 2005 in Oostende, Belgium. The theme of the workshop was to create an innovating game that uses Global Positioning System (GPS). The game Wanderer is played outside. The object of the game is that the player has to be in a continuous motion and has to respond to auditive signals provided through a headphone that is connected to the game system. Because the game is not mapped onto the coordinates of the physical space, it can be played in any location. The player is continuously confronted with the objects in public space functioning as game obstacles. In this way the game transforms the meaning of the physical object in public space.

Why do I blog this? I think it's a very simple game design that is very clever, I like this usage of technology to create weird kind of situations (like you receive order to get in certain direction but there are obstacles that you have to deal with).

More about it here.

Field trial of a location-based annotation system

My colleague Mauro is looking for guinea-pigs for the field trial of his STAMPS application, a location-based annotation system running on mobile phones.

STAMPS: Share your experience of the city

What is it?This is an academic research project of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. STAMPS is a little application that allows you to leave notes on a map using your mobile phone. You can see a map of the place where you are, visualised on the screen of your mobile. There, you can write a kind of SMS and attach it to the map so that other friends can see your message appearing on their map. You can write for instance: “this is my favorite pizzeria!”, to offer advice to your buddies. All the messages left in the system say something about the city where you live: what are the sport locations, the place to eat, the meeting spots. After a while, we want to use all these information to help the users to ‘navigate’ the city. You can ask the system, for instance: “where is a pizzeria nearby?”, and the system will search for other people’s messages which refer to the term pizzeria to give you an advice.

What are we looking for? We are looking for a group of ‘activists’, friends, who like to walk the city and annotate the spots they like the most, the places they hate. If you want to participate in this trial you need to be passionate about your city, informed on the activities running in the surroundings and ready to share this information with your friends. We expect from you to participate intensively for the next few months leaving notes of your activities in the urban area.

What is it for you? If you will be selected for the first trial all the connection costs that you will have to use the system will be reimbursed. If your telephone is not compatible with our software, we will give you a new one for the period of the trial. The most creative and active participants will be awarded with a monetary prize.

How can I apply for participating? Please send an email to shoutspace[at]gmail.com with your coordinates, your telephone model and your operator. If you apply with your friends you will have more chances to be selected. Please add the coordinates of your friends to the message.

Isolatr... locate where people weren't

(via aeiou) isolatr is meant to be a location-based service meant to find where other people weren't...There is also imolatr, "an inflexable IM client that always list you as away". It actually seems to be a joke directed to the web2.0 crazyness as attested by the faq.

Tracking and displaying the paths of visitors

Via Computing for Emergent Architecture: You Are Here 2004 (led by Eric Siegel) is an interesting application that tracks and displays the paths of visitors traveling through a large public space.

The system displays the aggregate paths of the last two hundred visitors along with blobs representing the people currently being tracked. When viewers approach the work, they can display the live video image with the paths of currently tracked visitors superimposed. (...) The technology of this system is rooted in surveillance systems that are rapidly being put into place in all of our public spaces: airports, shopping malls, grocery stores and our streets and parks. The motivation for such public systems ranges from security and law enforcement to marketing and advertising. The system of this artwork is wholly anonymous – no data is collected and the only use of the information is by the museum visitors to track themselves and their friends. However, in many real-world applications of such technology, the identities of those being tracked are also registered. You Are Here provides a visceral understanding of surveillance systems' capabilities and a sensual, visual representation of information that is normally only accessible as dry statistics.

This benevolent application of tracking is also meant to show the interconnectedness of viewers' with other visitors to the space by give them a sense of the aggregate presence of people over time.

Why do I blog this? it's an interesting art piece that address the issue of spatial data, food for thoughts for our replay tool project.

PSP and GPS: two tracks

There are two ways of thinking in terms of location-based games/services on the Sony PSP. The first track is to wait for the proper GPS adapter Sony is working on, scheduled to be launched before the end of 2006 (as written in the US PlayStation Magazine). It might be a USB adapter already presented at E3 in 2004 //thanks Sylvain!):

(picture via gamongirls)

The second track is of course to lack at the undergound world: gpsp is a hack that turns the PSP into a GPS navigation system, developed by ?Art?:

Hi Guys, this is the first version of a program for the PSP that provides a practical GPS Graphic User Interface (GUI). The GPSP software for Sony PSP runs under LUAplayer 0.11 or later. LUAplayer is free. If you haven't downloaded it, you will need to get it running on your 1.50 firmware PSP in order to try this out for yourself.

Well, as it exists at the moment, it will allow you to view data from a GPS Mouse on the screen of your PSP running the GPSP program. This occurs in real time, however there is a delay from when the data is received by the microcontroller circuit, and retransmitted at the slower rate to the PSP. The pic circuit is also filtering information from the NMEA sentences transmitted by the GPS mouse, and discarding any information that GPSP doesn't use so that minimal bytes are retransmitted by the pic circuit to achieve (or try) the fastest transmission that GPSP will interpret.

Why do I blog this? if the first track is released this would be a good step towards mass-market console with location-based capabilities (I'm not talking about cell phones here).

Wearable Computing (location-aware) for Aircraft Maintenance

Via Tom Nicolai's weblog (which is actually a "wearlog"), this Wearable Computing for Aircraft Maintenance, a concept for a combination of wearable computing and knowledge management with the goal to shorten the maintenance process in the aircraft industry. It's a kind of location-aware, wearable information system meant to facilitate the access to different sources of information a technician needs during the maintenance task:

The core of the wearable computer is a PDA. The device can be used like a usual PDA in the handheld mode or it can be stored in a holder for wearable operation. In the holder, the PDA connects to an HMD and automatically adapts its user interface to the changed modalities. By a wrist worn input device the user controls the wearable. The input device also contains a RFID scanner. The scanner will be used to identify areas in the aircraft. Subsequently the computer can display information and logbook entries associated to that area. The aircraft itself will be equipped with RFID tags and a server to store the part descriptions with references to the RFID tags. Data storage and knowledge management is not possible on the PDA directly. Thus, the PDA is designed as a client to a notebook computer carried in the toolbox of the technician.

New blog about space/place/locative tech: smartspace

Found via Technorati: smartspace by Scott Smith of Social Technologies (an international futures research and consulting firm based in Washington, DC):

Welcome to Smartspace, a new blog about annotated environments, intelligent infrastructure and digital landscapes--the merging of technology with the environment around us, and the overlay of digital environments on the physical ones we inhabit.

This includes discussions, observations and insights on ubiquitous and embedded computing, mapping, location-based services, surveillance and tracking, geotagging, smart homes, intelligent environments, the annotated reality, and virtual worlds, where the increasingly intersect with the physical.

An increasing amount of interest, research, development, investment and regulation is being directed at the world of smart spaces. The purpose of Smartspace is to provide context and explore implications of the convergence of the above mentioned factors as they relate to these activities. Hopefully we will feature interviews, guest authors, and other interesting features and contents that make Smartspace a compelling read.

I found it because he expanded the discussion about my post about the giving of one's location while calling with a cell-phone, Scott adds this intriguing walkaround:

Meanwhile, I find it interesting that, while we are waiting for applications that alert the person on the other end of a mobile discussion automatically as to our location as the call comes in, it would be easier at the moment to take a picture of myself on the train and MMS it to my wife using something like ZoneTag, allowing her to see where I am before I call. Talk about a workaround.

Indeed, image can bring the context that the user wants to show, with the level of accuracy (in terms of contextual cues) the user may want to show and convey in his/her message.

Why do I blog this? another interesting contributor in the field of social usage of space/place/locative tech, very relevant ideas so far.